As part of our push to improve the security of WordPress plugins, next month our Plugin Security Scorecard tool is going to start lowering the grade for plugins if the developer isn’t linking to the results of a security review of the plugin. To make sure that we practice what we preach, we are doing security review of our plugins and linking to those results in the way we are suggesting other developers do so. We can’t hire someone else to them, as we are not aware of anyone else that actually does reviews and has released any results to check on accuracy of their results. By comparison, we have been doing that for years.

For our third review, we checked over our Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin.

The review was done on version 2.0.96 of Plugin Vulnerabilities. We checked for the following issues during it as part of our standard review:

• Insecure file upload handling (this is the cause of the most exploited type of vulnerability, arbitrary file upload)
• Deserialization of untrusted data
• Security issues with functions accessible through WordPress’ AJAX functionality (those have and continued to be a common source of disclosed vulnerabilities)
• Security issues with functions accessible through WordPress’ REST API (those have started to be a source of disclosed vulnerabilities)
• Persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the frontend portions of the plugin and in the admin portions accessible to users with the Author role or below
• Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the admin portion of the plugin
• SQL injection vulnerabilities (the code that handles requests to the database)
• Reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities
• Security issues with functions accessible through any of the plugin’s shortcodes
• Security issues with functions accessible through any of the plugin’s blocks
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_action action
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_init action
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_post action
• Security issues with import/export functionality
• Security issues with usage of the is_admin() function
• Security issues with usage of the add_option(), delete_option(), and update_option() functions
• Security issues with usage of the update_user_meta() and wp_update_user() functions
• Security with usage of determine_current_user filter
• Security issues with usage of the wp_set_current_user(), wp_set_auth_cookie() and wc_set_customer_auth_cookie() functions
• Security issues with usage of the reset_password() and wp_set_password() functions
• Security issues with usage of the extract() function
• Lack of IP address validation
• Proper usage of sanitize_callback when using register_setting() to register settings.
• CSV injection
• Host header injection vulnerabilities
• Lack of protection against unintended direct access of PHP files
• Insecure and unwarranted requests to third-party websites
• Any additional possible issues identified by our Plugin Security Checker

Results

We found no issues with any of the checked items in version 2.0.96 of Plugin Vulnerabilities.